The term Management Dashboard defines a wide range of data reporting and visualization tools or dashboards that allow using various performance & efficiency measures to report on an enterprise’s ability to organize and coordinate its activities in accordance with certain policies and in achievement of pre-determined objectives.

Program management system (PMS) is designed to allow companies to create projects that help focus on program development, planning, and reviewing. It allows planning project characteristics and linking activities to objectives and goals of existing programs. Such systems let put a strong emphasis on aligning evaluations with project quality management and improvement processes. With help of PMS a project manager can use capabilities to manage project expectations by tracking, monitoring and measuring changes made to ongoing projects.

PMS is a foundation for defining structure which is closely linked to structure. Planning, approval and modification of programs can be done according to the three-step process taken from project management. The process includes the following steps:

Planning.

Review.

Approval.

Each of the steps can be considered as a sub-project. Full implementation of the sub-projects will create a program management framework for further investigation and analysis of programs. Project managers can conduct system analysis and estimations to generate a set of program management performance metrics to measure success of the sub-projects.

The system (PMS) will contribute to the development of projects and activities that are aligned with existing programs. It will give infrastructure for teams to plan, review and approve programs and to track status of each sub-project. Stakeholders who are always interested in better control of team structure will benefit from using tools for monitoring project activities, receiving reports and making estimations. They can review metrics and indicators to make strategic decisions and handle challenges.

Sometimes open source systems are used to manage the three-step process and projects. But often open sources solutions are not effective enough. It is rationality to choose full-featured systems for project & program management.

VIP Task Manager is a great example of project & systems. It includes tools for planning, reviewing, tracking, measuring and reporting projects, tasks, programs, and schedules. The software allows using to-do lists, checklists and templates to develop structures for projects and programs.

VIP Task Manager uses a client-server solution similar to the SharePoint technology. The software allows deploying central databases on servers. It grants authorized access to users who can connect databases over LAN or Internet.